Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Sexual violence within marriage is common and manifests in various forms, including marital rape.
Marital rape, reproductive coercion, inserting objects in the vagina or anus, and withholding sexual pleasure are forms of violence routinely experienced by women. Based on service records of survivors coming to public hospitals in an Indian city, this paper presents their pathways to disclosure and institutional responses such as hospitals and police. The findings highlight that a large proportion of survivors of domestic violence confide having experienced forced sexual intercourse by the husband while sharing their experience of physical, economic, and emotional violence with crisis intervention counsellors.
However, a small number of women do report marital rape to formal systems like hospitals and police. These systems respond inadequately to women reporting marital rape, as the rape law exempts rape by husband. Sexual violence within marriage can have serious health consequences, and a sensitive healthcare provider can create an enabling environment for disclosing abuse and providing relevant care and support.
One response by the Indian government was to introduce amendments to the criminal law of rape. Before these amendments, an act was considered rape only if there was an attempt at peno-vaginal penetration. The law did not include as rape other forms of sexual violence, such as inserting objects or any other body part into a woman's vagina, anus, mouth, or urethra. The Criminal Law Amendment Act, brought in critical changes providing a standardised framework on rape and sexual violence but, regrettably, the issue of sexual violence by the husband in a marital relationship marital rape is left out.
These amendments thus failed to address the concern of sexual violence within marriage. The law retains the exemption from the offence of rape of forced sexual intercourse by a husband with his wife. Violence against women VAW has been recognised as a public health issue and a violation of women's human rights. Yet, there is limited high-quality, actionable data on the prevalence of VAW due to limited capacities to measure prevalence, lack of resources and the ethical and methodological challenges in researching VAW.
